Guns and the Constitution

It used to be said in the early days in this country that the only books you really had to have were the Bible and Shakespeare.  Tucked in there, too, must have been some ancient history, for growing up in East Texas, I was surrounded by town names like Athens and Carthage and Palestine, and the Sabine River ran not far away.  Rural and small town people were knowledgeable both about ancient times and what was going on elsewhere in the world right then, for after all, the rest of the world was not all that different, and the technology for transmitting news, a rider on horseback, was equally available to all.  The big places, like Washington and Boston, were towns of about 25,000, the best size for a place according to Aristotle, and the lowest limit for calling the place a city according to the Census.  The Bible is still standard issue, but somewhere along the way the Shakespeare and the history and the urge to stay current seem to have gotten misplaced.  For in parts of this country, rural and small town culture is a static thing, deliberately and desperately clinging to the past.

In his fascinating mini-series on public television, about the Prohibition Era, Ken Burns brought that to the fore as an underlying force that generated the prohibition movement.  In the early 20^th century, cities were becoming large and filled with new immigrants from strange places like Poland and Lithuania (there is no Krakow, Texas), who drank a lot.  Prohibition, in addition to all its other dimensions, represented the first major battlefield in what has become a more than 100 years war in this country between urban and small town culture.  The repeal of prohibition was a major victory for urban living and a grudgingly conceded defeat for the countryside.  Where I grew up, the joke was that Tyler would stay dry as long as the Baptists and the bootleggers could stagger to the polls.

A sadder victory for rural culture has been the long-term fierce allegiance to guns.  For guns, highly useful when protecting against rabid raccoons and snakes in the country, though useless as a modern missile defense, have no rightful place in a crowded urban movie house.  Yet the right to keep and bear arms, on the farm or in the movie house, continues to be a standard tenet of and a major victory for a small town culture that reveres all things from long ago.  The tragic consequences of this week’s shooting in Colorado will most likely again be ignored as “just the act of a madman”, when the real question is why the weapons were available in the first place.

From studying the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, I know full well that the language of the second amendment supports the right to bear arms, though it was intended, according to the Federalist Papers, to support their regulation for efficiency of militia operations.  That was in a time when opposing armies bore muskets, and bears and Indians were a real threat.  There were no crowded cities where a single person bearing a musket could pose a significant threat. The countryside’s fierce allegiance to a right that is no longer viable in urban culture is both misplaced and terrible in its consequence.  I am in general reluctant to consider changes in the Constitution; it is one of the great monuments to human progress and continues to serve us well.  But it is time to change or repeal the second amendment.  It is the relic of a violent past, and a promoter of a violent present.